Catherine – Saint on the Streets of Siena=========================================At age sixteen, Catherine of Siena (1347 – 1380) joined the Third Order of St.Dominic, spending her days nursing the poor—particularly lepers and victims ofthe plague.

The daughter of a prosperous fabric dyer, she was the third youngest of herfather’s twenty-five children. From the age of four she meditated and prayed,and at seven she took a vow of virginity. Against her parents’ objections, shecut her long hair so as to be unattractive to the man with whom marriage hadbeen arranged. During these years she was sustained by visionary experiences.On one occasion, during a pre- Lenten carnival, demons tempted her with thefeminine and marital joys she was denying herself. While friends and familyand neighbors ate and drank and danced in the streets—typical pleasures of amedieval community—she was in her dark cell. Suddenly Jesus and the Virgin andother saints appeared. Jesus put a gold ring on her finger, and Catherinebecame his bride.

From then on she held to strict asceticism, wearing a hair shirt and pelvicchain and residing in a secluded cell. But she gradually moved out into thestreets of Siena among lepers and the plague-infected. On one occasion, as sheknelt over a woman and drained pus from the woman’s putrid sores, she wasovercome by the sickening stench. Guilt-stricken by her revulsion, she reachedfor the bowl of pus, lifted it to her lips, and drank it, later insisting thatit was the sweetest taste she had ever known.

While some consider Catherine mentally unstable, others were deeply moved byher selfless acts of service. Like other Catholics of her day, she was deeplytroubled by the volatility of the papacy—and thus the church itself. In 1309,more than forty years before she was born, the papacy, prompted by carnage inRome, had moved to Avignon. Opponents of the newly elected pope had threatenedhis life, so the French king of France kidnapped and secured him in France.His successors continued to live in Avignon for nearly seventy years—a periodknown as the Babylonian Captivity of the Church by those demanding that popesreturn to Rome. Critics rightly regard the Avignon papacy as a puppet of theincreasingly powerful French regime, and not until 1377, did Pope Gregory XIreturn the papacy to Rome.

During this time, Catherine sought to convince the pope to depart fromAvignon, the “Babylon of the West.” With some twenty devoted followers, sheled a march to Avignon. She was granted an audience with the pope but onlyafter she was found by papal officials to be neither insane nor a heretic. Sheoffered a readymade solution: launch another Crusade. Gregory IX counteredthat the church needed to settle its internal strife before going to war, butCatherine argued that the best way to solve the problems at home is to declarewar on the enemy. That Catherine, according to one historian, “dominated PopeGregory and to a lesser extent Urban VI” is an unwarranted conclusion. She wasone among many who urged the pope to return to Rome. But her tenacity inserving the poor and challenging the hierarchy of the church solidified herfame.

Through revelations, she sought to confirm church tradition not clarified inScripture. Medieval theologians from Anselm to Aquinas, for example, hadargued that Mary was conceived sinless and remained so all her life, everremaining a virgin. Aquinas had summed up the common belief: “As a virgin sheconceived, as a virgin gave birth, and she remains a virgin forever.” Througha vision, Catherine confirmed the tradition and offers an additional detail:that Mary was not perfected until three hours after her conception. But herrevelation was trumped by theologian Duns Scotus, who insisted that Mary wasperfected at the instant of conception.

Catherine, who died in her early thirties, was canonized by Pope Pius II in1461. More notable, however, was her elevation by Pope Paul VI in 1970 toDoctor of the Church, along with Theresa of Avila, the first women to be sonamed. She was recognized again in 1999 by Pope John Paul II, who named her apatron saint of Europe.